Something doesn’t sit right with me about its authenticity, yet I can’t figure out how it was faked. Any ideas on this?
Too far away to be sure, and the debris flying away wasn’t red or meat looking, but I’m not sure either.
Compare with this footage.
IMO, it’s a fake. Too much blood/gore right when the arm is severed. Looks like a Mortal Kombat fatality.
Not a chance in hell that’s real. The blade cuts through his arm like it’s made of marshmallow fluff. There are two pretty sizable bones in the forearm, don’t forget.
Brilliant. 
That was one of my tipoffs. I was under the impression that if something like this happened, the blood would not fly out like that, especially with such a clean cut. But on the other hand (no pun intended), I don’t quite understand how this was done because a slow motion viewing of it seems to show a truncated arm. One of the comments says that it’s obviously fake based on the shadows, but I don’t quite follow that reasoning.
It’s just a flesh wound.
Yeah, it looks way too clean to be real, especially considering that the other guy didn’t appear to be moving his sword very quickly or very forcefully when it happened. Also note how Lefty appears to just let go of his sword immediately before the cutting stroke. It didn’t look like anything had happened to it that would have caused it to be wrenched or twisted out of his grasp; instead he just sorta tossed it to the side at the right moment. That gives it the appearance of a staged performance.
Also, if you look carefully at the slow motion segment, the guy’s “severed” forearm appears to begin moving much too soon, almost the moment the blade first touches it. It’s a reasonably good digital effect (or at least, it might be; hard to tell with the horrible video quality), but the timing and performance gives it away.
In theory, you could examine the shadows to see what action was happening. Most people faking things don’t change the shadow lines.
However, we don’t need to check that.
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The Dude’s arm flies off like it was attached with dry Elmer’s glue. This does not happen.
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The “attacker” was an awful swordsman, or just playing, and couldn’t have possibly used his flashy “wrist-only” ( :rolleyes: ) swordsmanship technique to de-arm-ify a housecat, let alone a human.
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The arm vanishes. They never show anything after that because they didn’t want to make mroe than about two frames of cheap animation.
Edit: Actually, a good point based on Stealth Potato’s comment, seriosuly, it doesn’t take much to fake a video when you use horrifically grainy footage so you can barely see anything anyway.
First, the movements are sufficient to maybe cut through a wrist, but not an arm. It looks like the guy on the left performs a wrist cut, something that could potentially cause a serious laceration, but probably not amputation, and then only by someone who knows what he is doing.
These guys obviously don’t know what they are doing/or are doing theatrical stage combat (the most likely scenario).
If they don’t know what they are doing or they are doing theatrical combat they are stupid as hell for using sharp blades. Not only that, but the terrible fashion in which they are using them would dull and nick the edges of a sharp blade so that they would look like hell after the performance and possibly fail. Doesn’t make sense. Add to that the fact that it does indeed look like some sort of mortal combat fatality and I’m voting for fake as all hell.
The second part of these Cautionary Tales of Swords seems appropriate.
(Caution, a fair bit of swearing)
Obviously fake. The “hand” starts flying off before the sword even appears to really make contact with it.
Gold